So with his usual crowd pleasing panache Mitt Romney, the most wooden of presidential candidates for years, has picked his running mate, someone whom he might hope can engage with tax payers in a way that Romney Rich-Pig who may or may not pay tax (we just don’t know ‘til he coughs up the tax returns) is having trouble doing right now. If so Ryan may not have been his best decision.

Paul “Young Guns” Ryan was shown off to us on a defunct battleship in a museum, which might be an omen, in a strangely, self consciously, Bushian moment.

Ryan’s family background looks proletarian enough. The lobby boys are doing a grand job of deflecting interest to the combo of Irish and German immigrants that make up Ryan’s back-ground. What little we know, so far that is, is this. That, and the unfortunate fact that a goodly number of his immediate relatives fall off the perch with heart conditions in their mid fifties. He’s good looking, a Catholic to counter Romney’s cultic problems, a fiscal conservative, so will not flinch from a program of austerity for the masses and tax cuts for the 1%.

No, if you really want to see where Paul Ryan fits in to American political society look at his wife Janna. Now, most papers when they do show any interest whatsoever concentrate on the blond hair, the good figure and her clamping sweaty hands with party faithful. That, and the fact that she has American Indian ancestry, and specifically Chickasaw ancestry.

They don’t mention her closer family. Janna is a very well connected young woman what with her first cousin being Dan Boren the United States Representative from Oklahoma. Uncle Davy didn’t do badly either, as David Bowen he was a Governor of Oklahoma and a United States Senator. Uncle Davy we can be absolutely sure was right in with the establishment, a Rhodes scholar, he was educated at Oxford University in England and when he was at Yale, he was co-opted into Skull and Bones. Finally, Great-Uncle Lyle Boren was the United States Representative from Oklahoma way back in the late thirties.

Not that she was any slouch herself, what with the Wellesley College schooling and then being a Washington lawyer and lobbyist before marrying Paul Ryan after meeting him deer shooting.

Daily Mail 1999

Can’t have done the boy any harm can it?

Once again, when the final run is begun, the ordinary or even the extraordinary American candidates are slowly firmly but repeatedly pushed out by scions of the old oligarchical establishment.

Thanks for that, David. Very interesting….but not funny! (as the catch phrase went) ;-)
Very little good has come out of Oklahoma (where I now live). Woody Guthrie, Dr. Cornel West and Elizabeth Warren are the only ones that spring to mind.

I find Paul Ryan a scary proposition and even more so having learned of his Okie connections by marriage.

I think he’ll scare off too many to be a threat in 2012 as Mitt’s VP – but if the Republican powers that be are grooming him as a presidential candidate for 2016, time for a pendulum swing after 8 years of Dems in the White House – The US should tremble – I know I will, if I’m still around.